Chapter Four
From gaping graves, the hungry dead break fast.
The prison was silent, or as silent as a prison could be.
Seraphina could hear men whispering in their cells, breathing hard, or grunting in pain.
Night was falling, and they were all on edge, feeling the nightmares creep in, the ghosts of their pasts closing in to choke them.
She tuned them out and focused on the man she was trapped with. He shuffled behind her, and she tensed.
“Don’t,” she said.
“Don’t turn around,” he said at the same time. “Don’t look at me.”
He sounded terrified. Terrified of her? It made no sense, and she couldn’t dwell on it now, not when she was about to collapse from sheer terror.
The guards had to come back, she thought.
Bauer and Weber would see the madness of what Hartmann had done and return her to her cell.
Rune himself had said Bauer was a sensible man, and she’d noticed his hesitation earlier.
But why would she trust Rune or anything he said? He killed women.
And she was a woman. Vulnerable, unarmed, at his mercy.
No, she had to remember her training. If needed, she could be lethal even without her twin daggers.
She wasn’t helpless, even if the last twenty-four hours had nearly broken her.
It hadn’t been the prison, exactly, nor the cruelty of the guards.
If she was feeling powerless, it was all because of the voice in her head telling her she’d failed.
She’d left Saint Vivia’s Convent with a simple mission: revenge.
She’d had one of the men responsible for her misery in her grasp, and she’d let him live.
Her current situation, as deplorable as it was, wasn’t irreversible, but the fact that she’d failed herself like that.
.. She’d failed Matteo... That had humbled her, to say the least. Not broken her entirely, but if she didn’t do something about it, that was where she was headed.
Her own perception of herself was skewed now.
She’d thought she was a fighter, a merciless protector of the little she had left, of Matteo’s memory, and instead, she’d proven to be completely useless.
“I’m sorry,” Rune said.
“What for?” He was saying that a lot, and she filed the observation for later.
“For what he did to you.”
“You don’t know what he did to me,” she whispered.
“I won’t touch you, I promise.”
His breathing was erratic, as if he were hyperventilating. Without turning, she tried to estimate the distance between them. It seemed he’d moved, possibly a few inches to the right, to get even farther away from her.
“Why don’t you want me to look at you?” she asked.
“Because I’m hideous,” he said. “Why do you think they call me creature?”
She nodded. “All right. I won’t look at you, if you won’t look at me. I’ll keep my back to you, if you keep your back to me.”
“All right, I’ve turned around.”
Seraphina heard the rustle of straw as he sat on the floor, facing the wall.
She waited a few beats before allowing herself to relax somewhat and loosen her grip on the metal bars.
Slowly, she slid to the ground, gathering her legs under her and pressing her forehead to the cold iron.
As the nerves coursing through her dissipated, she felt the chill of the cell seep into her feverish skin, and she welcomed it.
Soon, she would be cold. Very cold, since her blanket had fallen off her shoulders when Hartmann had grabbed her, and now she was left without it.
“What now?” she asked.
“We’ll do whatever you want,” he said.
She scoffed. Whatever she wanted. She didn’t have any ideas, so she stayed silent.
She needed to think, except she found she couldn’t hold onto a single thought.
Every little noise distracted her. She couldn’t focus on finding a solution when every change in Rune’s breathing set her teeth on edge, and every soft click of his tongue when he opened his mouth to say something but changed his mind made her heart race.
“I want...” she started. “I’ll wait here until they come back. Can you just stay there, and I’ll stay here?”
“Of course.”
It was uncomfortable, but it wouldn’t be long now. They had to feed them dinner, right? She’d beg if she had to.
Seraphina and Rune sat in silence. A minute felt like an hour.
She thought about him asking her not to look at his face because he was hideous.
She was curious. How ugly could he be? And in what way?
Had he been born with a defect, or had his face been disfigured later in life?
It was better not to ask. Now that she knew he’d killed more than one woman, she didn’t want to have anything to do with him.
It was better not to even talk to him. It had been stupid of her to allow herself to feel any kind of kinship to someone who was clearly a monster of the lowest sort.
Three years into the relic war, Seraphina had adjusted her perception about the taking of lives.
And before that, there had been twenty-three years of recurrent warfare across Europe before Napoleon was defeated at Waterloo.
Spilled blood soaked the earth, so much death and terror, so many horrors.
One war ended and another began, this time in the Kingdom of Bavaria.
The other European countries, depleted, decided to take a step back and watch from the sidelines.
This time, the enemy was the sole creation of Bavaria, of the city of Ingolstadt itself, having been educated at Kr?henstein Academy.
He was the result of the many disputes festering inside the Sarumite Order, so he was the Order’s problem.
Seraphina knew the loss of lives was sometimes necessary.
They made sense in the grand scheme of things, and as a pragmatist, she wasn’t held back by questions of ethics, or morality, or what God wanted.
Her own planned revenge – the death of four people, now five after being reminded of Hartmann and his cowardice – she saw as more than necessary.
A requirement for the betterment of the world.
But what Rune had done was different. Killing women who earned their bread with their bodies.
.. That was strictly for pleasure. Even thinking about it made her shake with newfound terror and deep-seated anger.
Hartmann had put her in his cell hoping he would rape and eviscerate her.
Or maybe the creature preferred to do it the other way around.
Wouldn’t it be a nice surprise if instead, Seraphina pulled her shit together, remembered who she was, and bettered the world by ridding it of a serial killer?
“You’re cold,” he said. He must’ve heard her teeth chatter. “You can have my blanket. I’ll slide it over to you.”
“No, don’t you dare move closer. Throw it at me.”
She made sure to keep her head down in case he turned.
The blanket brushed her arm as it fell in a heap at her side.
Before wrapping it around herself, she brushed her fingers over the rough fabric to make sure it didn’t hide anything suspicious.
It was fairly clean, which was unexpected.
It didn’t even smell that bad. There was a mustiness to it, yes, but also the smell of water and cool air, as if it had been hung near the window to dry.
“Thank you,” she said.
His reply was a soft grunt. What made no sense to her was how someone who’d committed such heinous acts could be so kind and caring. Unless it was a facade to draw her in and manipulate her into letting her guard down.
The slam of a door in the distance interrupted her thoughts. What followed was the clamor of the wooden club banging against iron bars as the guards moved from one cell to another. The prisoners responded in kind, yelling and cursing. Some pleaded. Seraphina waited with bated breath.
Her hopes were shattered when Weber shouted at her to get back, then smashed her fingers with the club when she wrapped them around the bars.
She cradled her hand to her chest as she huddled near the wall, turning her face away from them, still keeping her back to Rune.
She begged them to return her to her cell, but Weber laughed and Bauer didn’t react.
The man who was with them placed two bowls on the floor, along with two pieces of bread and two cups of water, then the door was shut and locked, and they all moved on.
“Fuck,” she said under her breath, her fingers throbbing. She inspected them gingerly, but they didn’t seem to be broken.
“Are you all right?” Rune asked.
“Yes,” she said, harsher than intended.
The food smelled something awful, but her empty stomach still rumbled.
“You can have my share,” he said.
And there it was again, that feeling of weakness and vulnerability, just because she was hungry, and in pain, and he’d noticed. She cursed under her breath again and again, and Rune didn’t say anything, just listened to her and waited for her to calm down.
He’d asked her not to look at his face because he was hideous. She’d asked him not to look at her face, because if he saw what she was trying to hide under the linen scarf, he would think her even weaker. An easy prey, maybe easier than all the ones before.
She ate quickly. The vegetable stew was thin, made from scraps, and there was no spoon, so she soaked the hard bread in it and ate it with her fingers. The portion was small, so she ate Rune’s too. After all, he had offered, and if he’d indeed killed those women, then he deserved to starve.